• Korean Journal of Human Ecology
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.257-267
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• 2012

The purpose of this study was to observe work-related emotional consequences in call center employees. The data were collected from 434 employees in 3 call centers by way of a self-administered questionnaire. Frequencies, Cronbach's alpha, T-test, one-way ANOVA, Pearson's correlation analysis, and multiple regression analyses were conducted by SPSS Win 18.0. The results of this study were as follows: first, job burnout proved to be significant, and demonstrated a positively correlation to surface acting and negatively correlation to deep acting. Second, altruism proved to be significant and demonstrated a positive correlation to deep acting, while also demonstrating a negatively correlation to both sex and surface acting. Third, conscientiousness proved to be significant and demonstrated a positive correlation to both age and deep acting, as well as a negatively correlation to surface acting. Finally, work-family conflict proved to be significant and demonstrated a positive correlation to both sex and workload in terms of hours per day.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.123-140
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• 2020

In call centers where customers contact a firm's customer service without face-to-face interaction, customer service representatives (CSRs) determine its service competitiveness. In other words, a firm's service excellence relies on its CSRs. Drawing on the concept of agility from service and information technologies studies, this study conceptualizes customer response capability as a variable consisting of customer response expertise and customer response agility, and further verifies its effects on customer service performance. Moreover, this study examines whether a firm's digital and human knowledge resources are related to CSRs' customer response capability. To empirically test the proposed hypotheses, the partial least squares analysis is conducted with a total of 371 responses collected on CSRs from two insurance call centers. The findings indicate that a firm's digital and human knowledge resources enhance CSRs' customer response expertise and customer response agility, thereby increasing customer service performance. The results draw the conclusion that CSRs' customer response capability is a key antecedent of superior customer service.

• Korean Security Journal
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• no.43
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• pp.67-97
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• 2015

In Korea, a single emergency number, such as 911 of the USA and 999 of the UK, does not exist. This issue became highly controversial, when the Sewol Ferry Sinking disaster occurred last year. So, the Korean government has planned to adopt a single emergency number, integrating 112 of the Police, 119 of the Fire and Ambulance, 122 of the Korean Coast Guard, and many other emergency numbers. However, the integration plan recently proposed by the Ministry of Public Safety Security seems to be, what is called, a "partial integration model" which repeals the 122 number, but still maintains 112, 119, and 110 respectively. In this context, the study looks into USA's (diverse) 911 operating system, and subsequently tries to draw general features or characteristics. Further, the research attempts to derive policy implication from the general features. If the proposed partial integration model reflects the policy implications, the model can virtually operate like the 911 system -i.e. a single emergency number system - creating inter-operability between responding agencies such as police, fire, and ambulance, even though it is not a perfect integration model. The features drawn are (1) integration of emergency call-taking, (2) functional separation of call-taking and dispatching, (3) integration of physical facilities for call-taking and dispatching, and (4) professional call-takers and dispatchers. Moreover, the policy implications derived from the characteristics are (1) a user-friendly system - fast but accurate responses, (2) integrated responses to accidents, (3) professional call-taking and dispatching & objective and comprehensive risk assessment, and finally (4) active organizational learning in emergency call centers. Considering the policy implications, the following suggestions need to be applied to the current proposed plan: 1. Emergency services' systems should be tightly linked and connected in a systemic way so that they can communicate and exchange intelligence with one another. 2. Public safety answering points (call centers) of each emergency service should share their education and training modules, manuals, etc. Common training and manuals are also needed for inter-operability. 3. Personal management to enable-long term service in public safety answering points (call centers) should be established as one of the ways to promote professionalism.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.808-822
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• 2011

In the subject experiment of this paper, contrary to the existing thesis about the emotional labor of people in the face-to-face service industry, I have chosen call center agents as they are primary first point of contact with customers in the airline industry. The main purpose of this experiment is to understand the relationship in between workplace burnout and emotional labor. In this study, I have investigated the following concepts; the effect of mediation on emotional labor, the different levels of emotional labor, and recommendations for improvement of competitive power to the call center agent as a member of the organization. The main results of experiment are as follows. First, the emotional labor given by the airline call center agents affects the rate of burnout. Second, support from workplace superiors showed that mediation had an effect on the relationship between emotional labor and burnout, however support from co-workers had no effect whatsoever. It is hope that this paper would supply information to give a competitive edge for airline call centers and their agents.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.99-120
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• 2010

Due to the wide spread of customers' frequent access of non face-to-face services, there have been many attempts to improve customer satisfaction using huge amounts of data accumulated throughnon face-to-face channels. Usually, a call center is regarded to be one of the most representative non-faced channels. Therefore, it is important that a call center has enough agents to offer high level customer satisfaction. However, managing too many agents would increase the operational costs of a call center by increasing labor costs. Therefore, predicting and calculating the appropriate size of human resources of a call center is one of the most critical success factors of call center management. For this reason, most call centers are currently establishing a department of WFM(Work Force Management) to estimate the appropriate number of agents and to direct much effort to predict the volume of inbound calls. In real world applications, inbound call prediction is usually performed based on the intuition and experience of a domain expert. In other words, a domain expert usually predicts the volume of calls by calculating the average call of some periods and adjusting the average according tohis/her subjective estimation. However, this kind of approach has radical limitations in that the result of prediction might be strongly affected by the expert's personal experience and competence. It is often the case that a domain expert may predict inbound calls quite differently from anotherif the two experts have mutually different opinions on selecting influential variables and priorities among the variables. Moreover, it is almost impossible to logically clarify the process of expert's subjective prediction. Currently, to overcome the limitations of subjective call prediction, most call centers are adopting a WFMS(Workforce Management System) package in which expert's best practices are systemized. With WFMS, a user can predict the volume of calls by calculating the average call of each day of the week, excluding some eventful days. However, WFMS costs too much capital during the early stage of system establishment. Moreover, it is hard to reflect new information ontothe system when some factors affecting the amount of calls have been changed. In this paper, we attempt to devise a new model for predicting inbound calls that is not only based on theoretical background but also easily applicable to real world applications. Our model was mainly developed by the interactive decision tree technique, one of the most popular techniques in data mining. Therefore, we expect that our model can predict inbound calls automatically based on historical data, and it can utilize expert's domain knowledge during the process of tree construction. To analyze the accuracy of our model, we performed intensive experiments on a real case of one of the largest car insurance companies in Korea. In the case study, the prediction accuracy of the devised two models and traditional WFMS are analyzed with respect to the various error rates allowable. The experiments reveal that our data mining-based two models outperform WFMS in terms of predicting the amount of accident calls and fault calls in most experimental situations examined.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2011.04a
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• pp.808-813
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• 2011

There are hundreds of thousands call center workers wearing acoustic device. However, researches and noise exposure measurements on the noise transmitted from acoustic devices have seldom been performed due to the difficulty of measurement and to the absence of the measuring method in Korea. The aim of this study is to set up management measures to protect hearing loss on the call operator by acquiring measurement data of noise transmitted from the headset Noise exposure measurements of 17 operators were performed in 7 call centers and Head and Torso Simulator method in compliance with the ISO Standard 11904-2 was used for the measurement of noise transmitted from the headset Sound pressure levels(SPL) transmitted from the headset were 73.2~86 dB(A). The operator exposed to the highest SPL set up his volume control at 9 which was the highest volume level. The volume control level, adjustable from 1 to 9, could be identified 12 out of 17 operators and the range of volume levels was 4.5~9. As a result of Pearson Correlation Analysis, the correlation between volume level and SPL transmitted from the headset showed high relation as significance at the 0.672 level(p<0.05). To protect hearing loss of call center operators, it is more practical and effective measure to limit the volume level below the noise exposure level, i.e. 85 dB(A), rather than to carry out noise monitoring considering cost-effective aspect.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.21 no.7
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• pp.615-621
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• 2011

There are hundreds of thousands call center workers wearing acoustic device. However, researches and noise exposure measurements on the noise transmitted from acoustic devices have seldom been performed due to the difficulty of measurement and to the absence of the measuring method in Korea. The aim of this study is to set up management measures to protect hearing loss on the call operator by acquiring measurement data of noise transmitted from the headset. Noise exposure measurements of 17 operators were performed in 7 call centers and head and Torso simulator method in compliance with the ISO standard 11904-2 was used for the measurement of noise transmitted from the headset. Sound pressure levels(SPL) transmitted from the headset were 73.2~86 dB(A). The operator exposed to the highest SPL set up his volume control at 9 which was the highest volume level. The volume control level, adjustable from 1 to 9, could be identified 12 out of 17 operators and the range of volume levels was 4.5~9. As a result of pearson correlation analysis, the correlation between volume level and SPL transmitted from the headset showed high relation as significance at the 0.672 level(p<0.05). To protect hearing loss of call center operators, it is more practical and effective measure to limit the volume level below the noise exposure level, i.e. 85 dB(A), rather than to carry out noise monitoring considering cost-effective aspect.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.85-93
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• 2022

Today's customer service providers, who have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction, are experiencing severe stress and job burnout due to various causes. Unlike general companies, the corporation has a relatively high level of dissatisfaction with customer service since there is a large conflict between the provision of kindness and the reasonable handling of civil complaints according to laws and regulations. In order to analyze the environment of the NPS' customer service providers, 5.583 branch employees working at the National Pension Service and 407 call center employees were surveyed online using the questionnaire function of the Enterprise resource planning system. The contents of the survey consisted of a survey on customer-facing employees, the level of awareness of customer-facing workers protection measures, and opinions on improvement and supplementation related to customer-facing workers protection measures. As a result of the survey, 72.8% of the total respondents experienced grievance complaints, and the proportion of call center employees was even higher at 89.0%. In addition, both the branch and the call center had the largest share of complaints about obstruction of business, unreasonable demands, abusive language, and verbal abuse. More than 40% of call center employees in their 20s and 30s experienced the highest frequency of complaints 13 or more times a year. The most difficult thing in the process of responding to complaints was that both branch offices and call centers had insufficient psychological recovery time, lack of space, and lack of help from colleagues and superiors. Based on the survey analysis, it is suggested to establish a countermeasure through case analysis rather than the right to suspend work for civil complaints that cannot be handled, such as customized manuals and action strategies for the age group with high grievance complaints.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2015.10a
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• pp.19-20
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• 2015

Since 2013, Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) has introduced big data initiatively in administration and put into practices in transportation, safety, welfare in order to overcome limited resources and conflicting interests. For establishing a new midnight bus service, SMG prepared optimized midnight bus routes by analyzing big data from mobile phone Call Data Record (CDR) through collaboration with a telecommunication company. Despite of limited budget and resources, newly identified routes can cover over 42% of the citizen with 9 routes and less than 1% of buses compare with day time operation. In addition to solve transportation problem, SMG utilizes big data to resolve location selection problem for choosing new facility locations such as life double cropping centers and senior citizen leisure centers. As results, SMG demonstrates big data as a good tool to make policies and to build smarter city by overcome space-time limitation of resources, mediation of conflicts, and maximizes benefit of the citizen.

• Journal of the Chungcheong Mathematical Society
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.405-411
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• 2014

Queueing systems with retrials are widely used to model many problems in call centers, telecommunication networks, and in daily life. We present a very accurate but simple approximate formula for the distribution of the number of retrying customers in the M/G/1 retrial queue.